Posted
by
timothy
on Wednesday March 16, 2011 @05:13AM
from the but-why-is-virgin-mobile-doing-it-to-me? dept.

DJRumpy writes "The US military has blocked access to a range of popular commercial websites in order to free up bandwidth for use in Japan recovery efforts, according to an e-mail obtained by CNN and confirmed by a spokesman for US Strategic Command. The sites — including YouTube, ESPN, Amazon, eBay and MTV — were chosen not because of the content but because their popularity among users of military computers account for significant bandwidth, according to Strategic Command spokesman Rodney Ellison. The block, instituted Monday, is intended 'to make sure bandwidth was available in Japan for military operations' as the United States helps in the aftermath of last week's deadly earthquake and tsunami, Ellison explained."

MWR (Morale, Welfare, ad Recreation). Since most military network decisions are service wide, the military has been fairly lenient in allowing access to "fun" sites as an MWR resource for soldiers deployed in places where they don't have a lot of civilian Internet access (Mostly Middle Eastern areas, but there's other smaller deployment location with limited access). I was in Iraq 5 years ago before Facebook and the like exploded, but LiveJournal was one of the big ways I kept in touch with people.

That would be fine, except most people don't understand what bandwidth is or how they can avoid wasting it (Note: this is not to say that they are stupid or ignorant, they simply don't have a reason to give a shit as computers are not in their interest/skill set). For the people who wouldn't understand the sign about wasting bandwidth, trying to go to YouTube.com and seeing a blocked message would most likely make them give up and find something better to do with their time.

I'm afraid you are right, so few understand the intricacies of a network. I work with quite smart engineers and when the company addressed the slowdown of our connection we were requested to stop using streaming services.

A couple of them came together and suggested we could all listen to the same radio station to limit bandwidth used...

The implication of your post at least as I read it is that the suggested solution of all listening to the same station would NOT reduce bandwidth usage.

Well, if you're doing it right, and depending on where your bandwidth bottleneck was and the topology of the network, they were right, listening to the same internet radio station/could/ free up bandwidth.

Assuming the congestion is on the internet link(s), setting up a single (or even two or three) icecast/shoutcast/whatever station proxies would work. You

I think you forget you're talking about the same people who did not refuse to take part in a criminal war that caused the death of 100k civilians. I don't think it's unreasonable to question their ability to think of how their actions affect other people.

Note: I'm not BLAMING soldiers for going to Iraq. I'm just observing that they did not demonstrate an ability to think of others, especially not foreign civilians, at a time when this was badly needed. Whether they are or aren't at fault for this is an entirely different topic that I am not discussing here.

That's pretty insulting to anyone in the military that risked their lives in Iraq specifically to make it a better place. Most of the soldiers over there have done truly stunning, selfless acts risking their lives to help out the people over there. You may disagree with the reasons for going to war, but not everyone who disagrees with you is stupid, ignorant, or evil. To think of them that way just shows you as the one lacking empathy.

I see your point. Mind you they don't get paid a lot (I think a PVT. gets about 20k/yr?) for what they sacrifice. I'm currently joining the Army Guard and trust me it isn't for the money when compared to just my base salary at work.

Failure to obey a lawful order is a crime and a violation of oath. The order to deploy is a lawful order. "Go kill that civilian" is not a lawful order and you'd have a case if any significant numbers of troops were being given or obeying such an order. It's also worth pointing out that most (for a very high value of most) of the 100K civilian casualties have not been caused by US troops. Accidents do happen in combat and they are both tragic and rigorously investigated when they do, but something like 90% of the civilians casualties have been caused by someone else.

Yes, it is. We never signed any international treaty which forbade us from invading Iraq. No treaty or convention was nullified, no international agreement breached. Was it wrong to do it? Maybe. Saddam was an asshole who murdered a ton of his own people to maintain a stranglehold on power. On the other hand, if that's our criteria for invasion we need a much bigger Army. Should we have waited for a UN mandate? I think so, sadly no one asked me. Was it illegal? Not by any national law or International agreement I am aware of.

I don't understand why they don't just throttle lower priority traffic. The same problem I have with ISPs. Look, I understand that if I'm a very high capacity user, I might be impacting others during my usage (MAYBE). But the rest of the time, what does it matter how much bandwidth I use, if the rest of the traffic is low? So rather than blocking or limiting sites or total transfer, just fucking set up some throttling rules so that during times when traffic is truly an issue (not based merely on time of day

Especially since typically when you say throttle the low priority traffic, it's often done by protocol, or even port. So, your ISP would be blocking your bittorrent protocol, and maybe news for your porn. All of the services mentioned are http:80 [80] or similar, so they'd be blocking a lot of what they DO need access to. Yes, just adding the most popular destinations is a much simpler solution. KISS

My ISP (Rogers Canada) actually has a feature whereby if there is available bandwidth, they actually do give it out in order to boost your current speed, automatically. The result is that my 3Mbit connection runs almost entirely at 10Mbit, because, at least as I've seen, they always seem to have extra bandwidth floating around. The not so great part is that I still have a 25 GB cap. I could pay for a higher cap, up to 175 GB, and a higher speed, up to 50 Mbit, but I don't have much of a use for that.

Probably not, especially if users are aware of why the ban is in place. Generally military staff have the intelligence to not intentionally disobey instructions/request. The use of these sites could be decreased dramatically, just be telling them not to use them for a while, the block is simply a way of putting a low barrier in place to discourage the final 25% or so of use.

It's like trying to diet. Many people know they should snack less, but struggle to resist temptation. Not having snacks in the house

Probably not, especially if users are aware of why the ban is in place. Generally military staff have the intelligence to not intentionally disobey instructions/request. The use of these sites could be decreased dramatically, just be telling them not to use them for a while, the block is simply a way of putting a low barrier in place to discourage the final 25% or so of use.
It's like trying to diet. Many people know they should snack less, but struggle to resist temptation. Not having snacks in the house doesn't stop you going out and buying them, however it provides a slight disincentive which helps some people stop snacking.

Plus lots of sites embed youtube videos. Someone could easily end up watching one without explicitly going to youtube without a block.

Many deployments of the IWF censorship list [iwf.org.uk] in the UK use a 404 Not Found [o2.co.uk] rather than 403. I've never found any official explanation for this, though I've read suggestions that it's to make people just assume that censored content isn't available rather than tip them off that it's being hidden from them.

I don't know what US military policy is, but it gives you an idea of how censors in the Western world think.

That's his point. If you go to a site with an embedded video, *you* may not realize that you're watching youtube, but the network does and helpfully blocks it prevent you from inadvertently breaking the rules. If there were just rule in place that says "Don't watch youtube videos," Private Joe might spend all day breaking the rules without even realizing it. Hence blocking is more effective than merely asking, even if everyone involved legitimately wants to comply.

I agree. At my workplace, a lot of sites are blocked. But when you try to access a blocked site, it says roughly: "This site has been blocked to safeguard bandwidth for core business processes. If you are sure you have a business reason to visit this site, please click here." And if you click the link, you're redirected to the actual site. And that's enough to discourage people - if they click the link, they can't say they went to the site by mistake, or didn't know it wasn't allowed.

We do something similar but the list is smaller and easier to bypass. The reason being that at one point about a quarter of our traffic was Facebook and that has little or no value for our work. Personally, I would have smacked the users but that's too hard for management.

Also, without a block, you'd get the "oh one person couldn't hurt" syndrome where individuals in a large population defy good stewardship out of convenience because they think their individual impact is insignificant. Multiply that mentality to thousands and that's why we get polluted rivers, streets with litter, etc. So a block is indeed more effective than any notice, even though people are able and willing to make the sacrifice.

That's a good, though unsurprising decision. Bandwidth should be used for the purposes that the infrastructure has been built for. Recreational uses are completely optional, IMO, and no one sane should expect them to be available during a conflict or a crisis. There's job to be done that you signed up to do, so go ahead and do it. And may God stand between you and harm.

Probably that, for once, the army is doing something useful by doing nothing (i.e. abstaining from an action)? (can I hope to see more such occasions?)Or sort of a notification that Japan is in "extreme demand for networks" (... and maybe you should limit you pr0n daily quota too, especially hentai, at least for a while)?

The US taking about a form of bandwidth in the open in some way was government-owned satellite networks early ~1990's?
The dream of endless Pentagon’s commercial satellite accounts are dreamy to many in the commercial market.
News like this gives the world idea that something is different, strange, unique, new, spinning up fast, in play?
What sucks military operations bandwidth? Would UAV like use be at the top of the list? Why would the ability to many unmanned tools be of such interest over Japa

What sucks military operations bandwidth? Would UAV like use be at the top of the list? Why would the ability to many unmanned tools be of such interest over Japan at this time?

I think you'll find that the bandwidth usage is primarily tied to the fact that they're essentially having to provide command and control networks to every unit in the area (there's likely little-to-no civilian capacity in the areas they're operating in, so they could well be providing the Japanese government & civilian relief w

Can't they just make them low-priority? That's a bit worrying: if a disaster in Japan can make the army block some websites just for bandwidth reasons, what would happen if they had to deal with an emergency in the US ? And what if in the middle of this emergency, someone wanted to see a video on Youtube containing info that he needs?

Except for Amazon blocking (are they really such a bandwidth hog like video streaming sites?), it's actually a pretty good idea. Why does vital info have to be in video format? How about a simple, good ole fashioned no frills web site with a page of text? That would be at least as informative, but conserve enormous bandwidth during an emergency.

I suspect that they went with blocking because it is way, way easier(especially if you are just aiming for an aggregate use reduction, not an ironclad 100% ban). Blocking probably just involves setting your DNS servers to return localhost or some LAN-side warning page for the domains. Priority setting would mean dicking around with QoS on god knows how many switches, that may or may not have the CPU time and resources to support it.

We know that PACCOM made the initial request, but one thing I always find lacking in these sensationalized news stories is the lack of investigative work that would help us understand the decision making process.

The reason that I ask, is because I remember when I was deployed with an Infantry Battalion, we more or less managed our own usage internally, but everything above the Battalion level (brigade or god-forbid base wide) seemed to have been handled by outside consultants who when I look back now, we

The Defense Information System Agency (DISA) periodically blocks, unblocks, and restricts access to various sites as they deem necessary. Generally, the most popular and trafficked sites are affected. Back in 2005 myspace was blocked off, but other networking sites were open. From Iraq, I could get on AIM's web portal (and google chat when it was unveiled), but not Yahoo for instant messaging. Some time later, it was allowed again.

The reason the NIPR exists on.gov and.mil computer systems is so Uncle Sam can do his job and complete the missions. Everything else is absolutely auxiliary and unnecessary. DISA recognizes the importance of keeping people in contact with their friends and families, and that they can often not access the internet anywhere except while at work, so they appropriately authorize things like social networking, news, personal email, etc., so long as it does not negatively affect the organization's mission(s). It may be nice to burn some downtime on Break.com or Hulu, etc., but if that bandwidth is slowing down other high-priority functions, then the line is clearly drawn.

This doesn't happen too often, in large part due to the fact that multiple non-internet networks exist for higher classifications of information systems. You don't want to display Top Secret data on an Unclassified machine, after all. That may land you in Quantico or Ft. Leavenworth:P

If DISA is directed to do so (by US STRATCOM) or DoD directly, then of course they'll comply.

I remember attending a DISN conference in 2008 or 2009, having them detailing why a group of sites (such as Myspace/Facebook, etc.) were periodically blocked off. They showed spikes in data usage around times of crises or major world events (the previous FIFA World Cup comes to mind, as well as the Marines going to Lebanon). It was pretty good insight as to how this process works -- if you're already on the ins

My first thought about what it would be like to be a user in this situation is that, upon seeing the "site blocked" message, I would simply go hunting around for a similar site - maybe MSNBC instead of CNN for example. It's the content I'm looking for after all - news in this case - that matters. I might have to Google around a bit to find that content of course and try a few alternative sites.
So wouldn't this approach actually increase the bandwidth usage?
As noble as the cause is, this approach doesn't

I think less bandwidth is used for 100 searches and an ultimately unsuccessful result, than in one single video.

Add to that, a large percentage of videos are direct link to the content, and the viewer doesn't really care that much about seeing it. How many times have you loaded up a page and it had a youtube video embedded that just starts spooling up, but you never watched it? They're not trying to censor videos here, they're just going after the low hanging fruit, and this is a VERY effective way to do it.

I thought I'd check into your initial statement, since I COMPLETELY misread it initially, thought you said that 100 searches would cost more, and I wanted to prove you wrong. Reading comprehension ftl.

Anyway, I just did a test search for the word "video" on Google. The resulting page had about 349KB of data that needed to be downloaded for the first 10 results, including thumbnails for videos and whatnot. Of that, I estimate that only about 96KB would not be cached content, since the other 253KB is stuff li

And add to that the issue of many videos embedded from youtube are spooled without being viewed.And the people who are emailed "Hey check this funny video on youtube LINK" and when the link doesn't work, they don't give it a second thought.

Remember that this isn't done all sneaky like. We aren't finding out about this because some clever individual took it upon themselves to find out what was blocked and complied a list. We are finding out about this because the military told everyone. They sent out a notice to their soldiers saying "These sites are blocked so that there's more bandwidth available for things relating to the Japanese emergency." So the soldiers know why it is being done and know that they aren't just supposed to get around it.

Regardless of your attack on "petulant geeks", you're right. Most institutions will deliberately keep secret what they block and, in many cases, why. Lack of information and confusion allows them to instill fear in students or employees. They hope that the fear will do more to keep them "in line" than a technical solution, and most managers/teachers/administrators are adept at orchestrating it.

This email serves as official notification on behalf of the Army Reserve
Enterprise Network Operations Security Center to inform you that USCYBERCOM
has directed the temporary restriction to the internet sites listed below
until further notice.

The intent of the restriction is to alleviate bandwidth congestion to assist
with HIGH Availability/Disaster Relief efforts in the PACIFIC Area Of
Responsibility (AOR).

As of 0310Z 13 March all 13 Internet sites below have been temporarily
restricted:

I have to think that that this only applies the networks in the U.S. since the overseas bandwidth doesn't affect us here. I'm not even sure that they're on the same military network over there that they are here. I may be wrong about that, though.

Either way, I still agree with you. At least they didn't block Facebook since that's one of the few ways the guys have to talk to their families. That and Skype.

Why the hell did they bother to block MySpace...does anyone even use that?

This can't be 2010, because in 2010 you would have the technology to throttle a set of sites that were less important to give important network traffic a guaranteed level of throughput--without having to block the sites completely.

This can't be 2010, because in 2010 you would have the technology to throttle a set of sites that were less important to give important network traffic a guaranteed level of throughput--without having to block the sites completely.

And that would be an entirely appropriate and worthwhile solution if one were an ISP dealing with too many torrents, instead of the military trying to save lives.

Implementing and testing a dynamic throttling system is - or should be - a very low priority when one is in the middle of major disaster recovery. (The loss of eBay or ESPN doesn't count as a 'major disaster'.) Just cutting off these domains is the simplest, most effective, least failure-prone way to free up bandwidth.

Maybe I'm missing something, but how would access to the public Internet affect "military operations" (per the article)? Should I be scared that our military relies in anyway on the Internet to function? I understand maybe they backhaul Internet traffic across a private network, but if that's the case, why not just prioritize the important traffic? Then people can use the leftover bandwidth to do whatever they please.

Uhhh.... ever hear of a VPN? Not all military networks are classified. Those that are are air-gapped from the Internet. If the military wasn't using public and commercial networks for unclassified operations, I as a taxpayer would be extremely pissed, as they'd be wasting a shit-ton of money. They already do that well enough (although one can argue they are still the only branch of government that actually accomplishes what it is funded for, regardless of the expense). No need for a gazillion OC-48s running

Military networks already block wikileaks and seems to have a filter built in to block pages it suspects to contain content from it. Every time ars has an article related to it, that page alone is blocked. Politics aside, it's understandable that it's blocked since you *are* on a government system to begin with and they can control what goes on their network.

Yes, because in an emergency, I really want to see the DoD spin up a multi-million dollar "Uncle Sam wants you to use less bandwidth!" awareness campaign that will take months to design and implement. I'm sure the people of Japan won't have any problem with hearing, "Sorry, we can't support a mission to go rescue your family right now, because Bob just really needs to watch that funny Charlie Sheen cooking video again."

That's a much better solution than the 30 minute solution of blocking the sites, display

Most of these sites are a pretty big MWR resource for deployed troops, they'll likely restore access after the crisis. They've blocked and unblocked sites on a bandwidth and use basis for years. I couldn't get to LiveJournal for two weeks on three occasions when I was in Iraq in 2005 becasue they had some bandwidth constraint or other. It always came back after the constraint lifted.